Faces of Jingmaishan 1: Grandma Yi Weaves Stories of her Village

Faces of Jingmaishan is a series of 4 short vignettes focusing on the stories of locals I met while traveling in Jingmaishan, a tea mountain in southern Yunnan, west of Xishuangbanna, close to the border with Myanmar. The entire mountain of Jingmaishan is a huge terraced Pu'er tea farm, tended by a scattered handful of ethnic minority villages. It’s worth spending more time than I was able to give on my trip in March 2024, and I encourage everyone to visit if they can. This is Faces of Jingmaishan 1/4.

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It's 8am and I’m up early to explore the village.

I find a tiny local grandma squatting in front of her house next to the woodpile, weaving threads among sticks in the ground.

I'm unsure if she speaks Mandarin, but I decide to try anyway.

"Hi Grandma, what are you making?"

"A knapsack"

What luck. I'm in an ethnic minority village of just a few hundred Blang people (布朗族), 20km up a Yunnan tea mountain, and I was not expecting to be able to communicate smoothly with someone of her age (I was assuming she wouldn’t be able to speak Mandarin, only the local language).

"I see. It looks like you just started. Can I hang out and watch?"
"Sure, you can watch."

"Do you mind if I take some pictures?"
"I don't mind"

"Okay. How many bags can you make in a day?"
"Three days"
"You can make three in a day?" (I misunderstood her)
"No, three days..."
"Ohh it takes you three days to make one. That's very tiring!"
"No, not tiring..."

She glances up at me and her weathered face cracks into a smile...
"...but my butt will hurt!" [unfortunately I ended the video just before she said this]

"Hahaha of course. Who taught you how to weave this way?"
"My mother. When I was 9 years old..."
"Did you teach your daughter too?"
"No, I have just one child...a son..."
"Do young people from the village still know how to weave like this?"
"No...they manage guesthouses...or make tea"

"Are you making the bag for your family, or to sell?"
"I don't know yet." She looks up at me again. "Do you want to buy it?"
"I won't have time...I will leave today after breakfast"
"Do you need breakfast? I'll make you breakfast"
"No thanks, I have it at my guesthouse"

"Which guesthouse?"
"It's Bang Jia Homestay, just down the hill" She nods. "Oh Bang Jia Homestay. I know it"

(While there are many homestays here, there are so few people here in total that she surely knows the owner. Heck, they're probably related).

"I guess you've seen a lot of change in the village. Can I ask how old you are?"
"Me? Hoooo, I'm old." She laughs. "I'm over 70"
"Wow, over 70! You're very active. Your body is quite healthy"
"Not bad"
"Have you been out of the village? For example, have you been to Lancang County?"

(This remote village is in Lancang Lahu Autonomous County, the seat of which is 75 km away. Lancang is administered by Pu'er City.)

"Yes, I've been to Lancang. When I was young, we walked to Huimin Town and took a bus to Lancang."
"Before the mountain road was built?"
"Yes"

The drive from Jingmaishan to the county seat of Lancang Autonomous County takes around 2 hours

"I guess it's a lot easier to go to Lancang now."
"Yes, a lot easier."

Now she looks at me curiously. "Where are you from?"
"Oh...I'm from the USA"

"Is it hard to come here from the USA?"
"Not too hard. The plane tickets are expensive though"

This word confuses her.

"Plane...ticket...?”

[The Chinese word for this is literally "machine ticket", which I suppose isn't very intuitive as a refererence to airplanes if you rarely think about airplanes].

"Tickets to take an airplane"
"Oh. How expensive?"
"Sometimes as cheap as 4,000 RMB. Or as expensive as 10,000 RMB."

"That's a lot. Once a girl from here got married to an American man. She left to live with him in the USA. Now she never comes back home. Not even for the New Year."

"Oh. Maybe the airplane tickets are too expensive for her. It's also a very long ride...indeed not so easy..."

She "ens" in agreement and then returns to the weaving.

I take the chance to just drink in the moment...no conversation, just the buzzing of crickets, the coos and chirps of wild birds, and the occasional punctuating rooster's crow as she weaves.

My phone buzzes. Time for breakfast.

"Okay Grandma, time for me to go. Thank you for chatting with me. Can I ask...what's your name?"
"My name...Yi Rong"
"Okay, thank you Grandma Yi. See you next time. Bye bye!"
"Bye!"

I leave Grandma Yi and head down the hill for breakfast.

I might be incorrect in calling her Grandma Yi, since Blang ethnic people traditionally didn't have surnames (they were assigned surnames by the government for census purposes). I didn't learn this until later. Her full name may be just Yirong.

That’s it for Part 1 of 4 of the Faces of Jingmaishan series, sharing my small everyday conversations with regular people living in the Jingmaishan region of southern Yunnan. Next time, I discuss tea economics with a roadside looseleaf tea vendor.